TARANTO, ITALY - 22 FEBRUARY 2018: Alessio Peretto (42), who has worked at the ILVA steel mill since 200 but is nonetheless part of activist group trying to shut it down, poses for a portrait in fron the plant in Taranto, Italy, on February 22nd 2018.

Taranto, a formerly lovely town on the Ionian Sea has for the last several decades been dominated by the ILVA steel mill, the largest steel plant in Europe. It was built by the government in the 1960s as a means of delivering jobs to the economically depressed south, but has been implicated for a cancer as dioxin and mercury have seeped into local groundwater, tainting the food supply, while poisoning the bay and its once-lucrative mussels.